Gloria insisted that if I didn’t want to come with her, that was fine, she would go by herself. I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I had never been to London, not even in peacetime, and the whole prospect scared me stiff. London seemed about as remote to me as the moon.
It was finally arranged for September. Gloria decided it would be best if we went and returned by night train. That way she would only have to rearrange her one and a half days off for midweek rather than ask Mr. Kilnsey for more time when things were busy. To her surprise, Mr. Kilnsey said she could take longer if she wished. Since he had lost Joseph at El Alamein, he had become a more compassionate and sympathetic man, and he understood her grief. We still decided to stick to the original plan because I didn’t want to leave Mother alone for any longer.
Cynthia Garmen said she would look after Mother and the shop while we were gone. She said Norma Prentice owed her a day’s work at the NAAFI in exchange for baby-sitting the previous week, so it should be no problem. Mother offered to buy the train tickets and gave Gloria some of her clothes coupons to use down there if we had time to visit the big shops. Though she accepted them gratefully, for once clothes were the last thing on Gloria’s mind.
It was about ten o’clock when the road crested the hill and Banks could see Edinburgh spread out in the distance in all its hazy glory: the stepped rows of tenements; the dark Gothic spire of the Sir Walter Scott Monument, like some alien space rocket; the hump of Arthur’s Seat; the castle on its crag; the glimmer of sea beyond.
Apart from one or two brief police-related visits, it was years since Banks had spent any time there, he realized as he coasted down the hill, Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” on the stereo. When he was a student, he used to drive up to see friends quite often for weekends and holidays. At one time he had a girlfriend, a raven-haired young beauty called Alison, who lived down on St. Stephen Street. But as is the nature of such long-distance relationships, “out of sight, out of mind” beats “absence makes the heart grow fonder” any day of the week, and during one visit she simply turned up at the pub with someone else. Easy come, easy go. By then he had his eye on another woman, called Jo, anyway.
Banks tried to recollect if he had ever taken Jem up to Edinburgh with him, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember even seeing Jem outside his room, though he must have gone out to buy food, records and dope, as well as to sign on the dole. Banks had never even seen him out in the hallway. He saw people come and go from time to time, strangers, sometimes at weird hours of the night, but Jem never mentioned any other friends.
Banks’s Edinburgh days were all pre-Trainspotting and the place didn’t look quite so romantic when he came down off the hill into the built-up streets of dark stone, the roundabouts and traffic lights, shopping centers and zebra crossings. He got through Dalkeith easily enough, but shortly afterward he made one simple mistake and found himself heading toward Glasgow on a dual carriageway for about three miles before he found an exit.
Elizabeth Goodall lived just off Dalkeith Road, not far from the city center. She had given him precise directions on the telephone the previous evening, and after only a couple more wrong turns, he found the narrow street of tall tenements.
Mrs. Goodall lived on the ground floor. She answered Banks’s ring promptly and led him into a high-ceilinged living room which smelled of lavender and peppermint. All the windows were shut fast, and not the slightest breeze stirred the warm, perfumed air. Only a little daylight managed to steal through. The wallpaper was patterned with sprigs of rosemary and thyme. Parsley and sage, too, for all Banks could tell. Mrs. Goodall bade him sit in a sturdy damask armchair. Like all the other chairs in the room, its arms and back were covered by white lace antimacassars.
“So you found your way all right?” she asked.
“Yes,” Banks lied. “Nothing to it.”
“I don’t drive a motorcar myself,” she said, with a trace of her old Yorkshire accent. “I have to rely on buses and trains if I want to go anywhere, which is rare these days.” She rubbed her small, wrinkled hands together. “Well, then, you’re here. Tea?”
“Please.”
She disappeared into the kitchen. Banks surveyed the room. It was a nondescript sort of place: clean and tidy, but not much character. A few framed photographs stood on the sideboard, but none of them showed Hobb’s End. One glass-fronted cabinet held a few knickknacks, including trophies, silverware and crystal. That would be tempting to burglars, Banks thought: old woman in a ground-floor flat with a nice haul of silverware just there for the taking. He hadn’t noticed any signs of a security system.
Mrs. Goodall walked back into the room slowly, carrying a China tea set on a silver tray. She set it down on a doily on the low table in front of the sofa, then sat down, knees together, and smoothed her skirt.
She was a short, stout woman, dressed in a gray tweed skirt, white blouse and a navy-blue cardigan, despite the heat. Her recently permed hair was almost white, and its waves looked frozen, razor-sharp to the touch, Margaret Thatcher style. Her forehead was high, and her glaucous, watery eyes pink-rimmed. She had a prissy slit of a mouth that seemed painted on with red lipstick.
“We’ll just let it mash a few minutes, shall we?” she said. “Then we’ll pour.”
“Fine,” said Banks, banishing the image of the two of them holding the thin teapot handle and pouring.
“Now,” she said, hands clasped on her lap, “let us begin. You mentioned Hobb’s End on the telephone, but that was all you saw fit to tell me. What do you wish to know?”
Banks leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. A number of general questions came to mind, but he needed something more specific, something to take her memory right back, if possible. “Do you remember Gloria Shackleton?” he asked. “She lived in Bridge Cottage during the war.”
Mrs. Goodall looked as if she had just swallowed a mouthful of vinegar. “Of course I remember her,” she said. “Dreadful girl.”
“Oh? In what way?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Chief Inspector, the girl was a brazen hussy. It was perfectly obvious. The flirtatious manner, the tilt of her head, the lascivious smile. I knew it the first moment I set eyes on her.”
“Where was that?”
“Where? Why, in church, of course. My father was the verger at Saint Bartholomew’s. Though how such a… a painted strumpet would dare to show herself like that in the sight of the Lord is beyond me.”
“So you first met her in church?”
“I didn’t say I met her, just that I saw her there first. She was still called Gloria Stringer then.”
“Was she religious?”
“No true Christian woman would go about flaunting herself the way she did.”
“Why did she go to church, then?”
“Because the Shackletons went, of course. She had her feet firmly under their kitchen table.”
“She was from London originally, wasn’t she?”
“So she said.”
“Did she ever say anything about her background, about her family?”
“Not to me, though I vaguely remember someone told me her parents were killed in the Blitz.”
“She’d come to Hobb’s End with the Women’s Land Army, hadn’t she?”
“Yes. A land girl. Tea?”
“Please.”
Mrs. Goodall sat up, back erect, and poured. The teacups – with matching saucers – were tiny, fragile bone-china things with pink roses painted inside and out, a gold rim and a handle he couldn’t possibly get a finger through. Not a drop stained the white lace doily. “Milk? Sugar?”